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The death certificate of my childhood arrived in a crimson red envelope.

I slipped the contents out onto my desk and unsealed them, unfolded them, unclasped them. I had never received a missive so delicate or so complex, and it took several moments for my baboon digits to free the contents to browse. What appeared from within shook my heart with horror. I trembled suddenly for reasons I could not then articulate. The sky outside seemed to darken, the clouds grew heavy with ash and smoke. Everything tasted like salt and copper and purple.

Tina is getting married in August. This was the first wedding invitation of my adult years.

Scan through photo history for pictures of road. Find one. “It’ll do.”

Every time I entered Bupyeong Station in downtown Incheon that spring, pretty young women would bound up to speak to me. Not just to speak to me, but to speak to me in English, and to invite me to various events and ask for my phone number. They would smile, and dutifully compliment my Korean, which was then (and still is) a widely known key to my heart. I was unaccustomed to positive attention from strangers while abroad, and was terrified by people willingly approaching me to speak English–an action so unfathomable I have had Korean strangers literally flee from me when confronted with the possibility. Their positivity and pleasantness was unexpected–rejuvenating, even. But it was also a little bit suspicious. After me, they approached any vaguely non-Korean looking people around and talked to them, too. What was this? Had Korean society changed overnight? Were we finally being embraced? One world? Could we all hug, and throw down our stupid racial differences, and maybe have a drum circle?